Part Twelve; Think Dirty; Dr. Charles Smith's Notoriety Spreads to England; Alongside Meadow and Southall; Powerful Telegraph Story;

"SIR ROY AND SOUTHALL ARE UNREPENTANT BUT, IN CANADA, THERE HAS BEEN AN INQUIRY INTO THE ACTIONS OF DR CHARLES SMITH WHO WAS FOR TWO DECADES ONE OF CANADA'S TOP FORENSIC PATHOLOGISTS. HE TESTIFIED IN 45 CASES DATING BACK TO 1991, TO CHILDREN BEING SUFFOCATED, SODOMISED AND SHAKEN. MANY OF THOSE PARENTS HAVE SINCE BEEN EXONERATED. 'I BELIEVE I HEARD WHAT I WANTED TO HEAR,' HE ADMITTED AT THE INQUIRY IN JANUARY."

CASSANDRA JARDINE: THE TELEGRAPH;

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In 2003 Sally Clark was released from jail after being falsely accused of murdering her two sons.

She never recovered from the trauma and died a year ago, effectively of a broken heart.

Cassandra Jardine looks at how such a gross miscarriage of justice could occur, asks whether lessons have been learnt, and places Dr. Charles Smith in the ranks of notorious British "expert witnesses" such as Drs. Roy Meadow and David Southall;

Jardine has written many times exposing the madness which has led to innocent British parents and caregivers being wrongly convicted of killing children.

This moving story ran in the Telegraph on March 16 of this year, under the heading, "Has Sally Clark's case changed attitudes to infant death?"

"Exactly a year ago Sally Clark died, aged 42, while her solicitor husband, Steve, was on a business trip," Jardine's article begins.

"At an inquest her death was ascribed to acute alcohol poisoning resulting from her grief and 'enduring personality change after a catastrophic experience," it continues;

"In other words she never recovered from the nightmare that began on December 13, 1996, when her first son, 11-week-old Christopher, stopped breathing.



Sally and Stephen Clark outside the Court of Appeal in January 2003. Sally was released from prison after serving more than three years for killing her two baby sons;

Mothers never get over the death of a baby, though they may move on.

For Sally - once a bright and capable solicitor - even that was not possible.

Two years later her second child, Harry, who was eight weeks old, also died suddenly.

From that moment Sally received not sympathy but condemnation.

Paediatricians decided - in line with what was then current thinking on child abuse - that two deaths in a family was suspicious and a Crown Court jury found her guilty of murdering both of her sons.

'Die, woman, die,' other prisoners shouted out as she climbed into the prison van.

What happened next made legal history.

In January 2003, after serving three and a half years of a life sentence, Sally was freed.

The defence at her second appeal revealed that Harry's body had been riddled with the bacterium staphylococcus aureus, which would have caused a form of meningitis - information that the prosecution pathologist Dr Alan Williams had not shared with Sally's defence at her trial.

As she left the High Court, Sally declared, 'There are no winners here.'

Others charged with similar crimes, however, hoped that lessons would be learnt from what was called in the Court of Appeal 'one of the worst miscarriages of justice in recent years'.

The way the medical evidence was presented to court was 'shoddy', said Dr Sam Gullino, a forensic pathologist from Florida, who prepared a report for Sally's second appeal.

'Sound medical principles were abandoned in favour of over-simplifications, over-interpretations, exclusion of relevant data and the imagining of non-existent findings.'

For a short while it looked as if the tide had turned.

Inherited disorders were found to explain other babies' deaths: three other mothers, Trupti Patel, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony, accused of shaking or smothering their own children, were found not guilty or had their convictions quashed.

Meadow's Law - named after Prof Sir Roy Meadow - was discredited: no longer were two cot deaths in a family to be deemed suspicious and three murder unless proved otherwise.

Summing up at Cannings' appeal in December 2004, Lord Justice Judge said that courts should not convict on disputed medical evidence alone: 'It is better for some of the guilty to go unpunished than for innocent women to be jailed.'

But, the cheers were short-lived.

Fast-forward three years to last November.

Once again the scene is a courtroom.

This time the woman on trial is mother-of-two Keran Henderson, a childminder who was looking after 11-month-old Maeve Sheppard at her home in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, in March 2005 when - according to Keran - the child suddenly went floppy.

Maeve died in hospital two days later, and Keran was accused of having caused Maeve's death by shaking her violently, having lost her temper over a dirty nappy.

As the verdict of guilty was delivered, Keran let out a piteous wail.

'If you could hear, as we did, the sound of that woman's grief you too might think her honest,' Mike Seckerson, the foreman of the jury, said.

But it wasn't this alone that caused him to reveal his 'disgust' at the way the trial was conducted.

He and the other medically unqualified jurors were bombarded by information from a dozen medical experts.

The majority of the jury 'listened to expert opinion and thought it evidence', leaving Seckerson with the unhappy task of delivering a majority verdict with which he disagreed.

Seckerson is not alone in fearing that yet another terrible miscarriage of justice has occurred.

Jack Straw, the minister for justice, has been inquiring solicitously about Keran's comfort in prison, says her husband Iain, who is campaigning to bring his wife home to their nine- and 14-year-old sons.

Neighbours have rallied around in support of a woman who had been a respected childminder for seven years, ran the local Beaver Scout group, helped elderly neighbours and was always up for any charity event.

Neither of her own children has ever suffered at her hand.

Significantly, Maeve had been in and out of hospital during her short life, yet none of this counted.

Someone had shaken the child, medical experts concluded, on the basis of certain signs.

'As an ex-policeman, I can't get my head around the fact that people are found guilty without any real evidence,' Iain says.

'There's no CCTV footage, no witness statement or weapon with fingerprints or blood. I think doctors are scared of saying, I don't know what happened.'

He is shocked that no one from the police or the CPS that he encountered was medically trained.

'I know the pressure is on the police to get results, to find someone guilty, but I wasn't even asked for my statement. Nor did they question the other children who were in the house that afternoon, who went home calm and happy. Would they have behaved like that if Keran had flown into a rage?'

Keran is not the only person in prison for a crime that might never have occurred.

Suzanne Holdsworth, another childminder, is three years into a life sentence for causing the death of two-year-old Kyle Fisher who also, she says, went floppy.

Doctors have compared the bleeding in his brain with injuries that would occur as the result of being thrown from a car at 60mph, yet he was not bruised and the banisters against which she supposedly battered him bear no traces of DNA.

Chaha'Oh-Niyol Kai-Whitewind is in prison for suffocating her son, though her appeal may reveal natural causes as an alternative explanation for his nosebleed and blood found in the lungs.

Criminal convictions for harming children are just the visible tip of the iceberg.

A far greater number of cases, where the evidence is insufficient for a criminal trial, are heard in the family courts, where on the 'balance of probabilities' parents are deemed to have harmed or (yet more vaguely because of 'personality disorders') be capable of harming children who are then removed from them, often at birth.

Information about family court cases is hard to obtain.

Proceedings are secret so no one knows which experts are saying what, though observers note clusters of similar cases involving certain consultants.

Parents claim that they are being accused of emotional and physical abuse on the basis of theories or syndromes that are not as foolproof as is claimed.



Angela Cannings, with her husband Terry. She was jailed for life for murdering her two baby sons, but had her conviction overturned in 2003

In the year since Sally Clark died, those facing family court proceedings have at last acquired a champion in the form of the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming who set up Justice for Families after his girlfriend's baby was nearly taken from her because she had once failed to report a stillbirth.

His office at the House of Commons contains files on more than 200 individual cases, which he uses to identify patterns and lobby for changes in the law.

'I hear of a new case almost every day,' he says.

'Smothering' has gone out of fashion as an accusation.

So has 'salt poisoning', which Ian and Angela Gay were accused of.

The couple were released from prison in 2006 when it was shown, at appeal, that their foster son Christian Blewitt suffered from a faulty osmostat, which allowed his body to accumulate fatally high levels of sodium.

They had not, as was claimed, force-fed him teaspoons of salt.

There remain, however, two controversial medical diagnoses: shaken baby syndrome (SBS), a cluster of symptoms deemed to indicate shaking; and metaphyseal fractures, which are fractures at the ends of the long arm and leg bones, believed to denote that a child's limbs have been wrenched.

Events usually start with a paediatrician or radiologist who flags up the possibility of non-accidental injury (NAI).

Social workers and police officers then look for evidence, sometimes ignoring information about good character or happy family life.

And often solicitors acting for the defence are 'supine', says Bill Bache, who having successfully represented Angela Cannings and the Gays is now working on Keran Henderson's appeal.

Bache, like Hemming, has many suggestions for improving the system: a thorough multi-disciplinary discussion of possible causes of injuries or illness before cases proceed being one of them.

At the heart of the problem, he says, lies 'angled dogmatism' on the signs and symptoms of abuse and a willingness by some doctors to give opinions outside of their areas of expertise.

'I am handling 35 cases of parents accused of child abuse at the moment,' he says. 'All medical conundrums.'

The drive to hold parents accountable for abusing children began in 1962 when a Colorado paediatrician, Dr Henry Kempe, published his research into 'battered child syndrome'.

Drawing on 302 cases of abuse of children under three, he concluded that 'beating of children is not confined to people with a psychopathic personality or of borderline socioeconomic status'; parents often denied causing the injuries but 'to the informed physician, the bones tell a story the child is too young or frightened to tell'.

This information was shocking.

It had always been accepted that psychopaths, addicts, sociopaths or even women suffering from post-natal depression could harm children.

Kempe was saying that apparently normal, loving people could be abusers.

His research changed the role of paediatricians; it became their task to spot hidden abuse.

Identifying the signs provided a useful career opportunity for ambitious doctors in the 1970s and 80s.

Dr John Caffey in the US wrote the first influential paper establishing SBS in 1973.

In Britain, Prof Sir Roy Meadow, author of the ABC of Child Abuse, rose to fame on the strength of his 1977 academic paper on Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy (MSbP) - children made ill by attention-seeking adults - based on the behaviour of two mothers, one of whom had (Sir Roy claimed) poisoned her toddler with salt, while the other had contaminated her child's urine sample with her own blood.

Knighted in 1996, Sir Roy was soon lecturing on the hidden epidemic of abuse and appearing as an expert witness.

By the time he gave evidence at Sally Clark's trial, Sir Roy claimed to have found 81 cot deaths which were in fact murder though, unfortunately, he destroyed the data.

He told the court that he could think of no natural explanation for either of the Clarks' children's deaths and quoted the case-clinching statistic that the chances of two cot deaths in one family was one in 73 million - a figure arrived at by multiplying the incidence of one death (1:8543) by itself.

It later emerged that the chance of a second death was more like one in 120 because there could be an underlying defect.

Though struck off by the General Medical Council in 2005 for 'gross professional misconduct', he was reinstated the following year.

The other leading light in the drive to unearth hidden abuse in Britain was Prof David Southall.

Working on aspects of MSbP in the late 1980s and early 90s, he videoed parents whom he suspected of suffocating children.

Thirty-three parents or step-parents were prosecuted, though the evidence may have been unreliable: clasping a child to the chest could, for example, indicate feeding rather than smothering.

The Clark case was also his undoing when, having merely seen Steve on tele?vision, he stated to police that it was 'beyond reasonable doubt' that Steve had murdered his sons.

A three-year ban from child protection work followed in 2004; in December 2007 he was struck off for, among other charges, concealing the medical records of some 4,500 children.

Sir Roy and Southall are unrepentant but, in Canada, there has been an inquiry into the actions of Dr Charles Smith who was for two decades one of Canada's top forensic pathologists. He testified in 45 cases dating back to 1991, to children being suffocated, sodomised and shaken. Many of those parents have since been exonerated. 'I believe I heard what I wanted to hear,' he admitted at the inquiry in January.

But the fall from grace of some of the theorists of abuse has not made as much difference as expected.

The term 'noble cause corruption' has entered the language.

The tainted term MSbP has fallen into disuse, only to be replaced by another set of initials, FII - Factitious or Induced Illness.

Real abuse is still being missed, as in the case of Victoria Climbié, partly because social services are busy investigating false allegations.

Change is slow, says Penny Mellor, who campaigns against non-scientific medical syndromes such as MSbP, because a small coterie of expert medical witnesses are sticking to theories that have been undermined by subsequent research.

'We have pathologists who don't have adequate training and experts who are so busy being experts that they have little time to keep up to date.'

Sir Roy's portrait still hangs in the London offices of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

'Why not? He is a past president,' says Prof Terence Stephenson, the dean of the medical school at Nottingham University and the college's vice-president for science and research.

He is one of the doctors who has adopted attack as the best form of defence in response to the fall of Sir Roy and Southall.

Speaking as Professionals Against Child Abuse, they argue that doctors are being victimised by parents and the media who deny the reality of child abuse.

'Protect doctors to protect children,' he wrote to the Prime Minister in February, following a report on the case of Jessica Randall, whose abuse at the hands of her father was missed by 30 professionals.

False allegations campaigners consider Prof Stephenson a 'hawk' who has appeared in 50 cases: he prefers, he says, civil cases where a single expert witness is jointly appointed.

'In criminal cases you have to be willing to be countermanded and cross-examined' - although later he says that 'an expert is only tested by being challenged by another expert'.

Stephenson comes across as a pleasant man, driven by a passionate belief in his cause.

'I have two children. If someone were to accuse me of harming them I would be heartbroken. But our role at the Royal College is to do what's best for children. Child abuse is still under-diagnosed.'

I want to question him about evidence that casts doubt on current orthodox thinking.

Diagnosis of SBS is based on a triad of symptoms: subdural haemorrhages, retinal haemorrhages and cerebral edema (swelling of the brain).

The triad is important because regardless of other evidence, such as the absence or presence of bruises, these symptoms - particularly retinal haemorrhages - are used to diagnose abuse.

Sally Clark would never have been put on trial had Harry not been found (erroneously it transpired) to have bleeding behind the eyes.

Equally, Jessica Randall was never put on the 'at risk' register because MRI and eye scans showed no retinal haemorrhages.



Jay and Trupti Patel after Trupti was found not guilty of murdering her three children;

Dr Jennian Geddes, a neuropathologist, has suggested in the Court of Appeal that the triad need not arise from shaking.

Choking could be an alternative.

'She admitted in court that it was only a hypothesis,' Prof Stephenson says dismissively.

(The same could be said of the theory that the triad always denotes shaking.)

There is research, too, which shows that the triad can result from a fall from only 3ft, as from a bed.

'Fewer than three per cent would get retinal and subdural haemorrhages,' he replies.

But are children who fall from beds always tested?

We move on to the other contentious area - meta?physeal fractures. Stephenson appears equally dismissive about possible alternatives to a diagnosis of abuse.

'I've seen hundreds. They are extra?ordinarily rare in real, witnessed accidents.'

Yes, but they are also hard to see and radiologists won't look for them unless the possibility of abuse has been flagged.

When I suggest that paediatricians, especially those appearing regularly as expert witnesses, appear to have fixed minds, he counters by making a derisive comment about Dr Colin Paterson, a pathologist struck off by the GMC (General Medical Council) for suggesting for the defence in 30 cases that children could suffer from temporary brittle bones, resulting in multiple fractures.

Some pathologists believe he had a viable theory, but the wrong causation. Stephenson says, 'There's no evidence to back up temporary brittle bones.'

Isn't there?

Infants are being diagnosed with rickets resulting from vitamin D deficiency due to insufficient exposure to sunlight. 'Only in ethnic minorities.' Not according to research from Birmingham University, which states that one in eight Caucasian children has rickets.

'No doubt there are grey areas,' he concludes. 'If we only reported cases where we were absolutely right we would miss lots of cases. Society wants us to err on the side of caution. If society wants us to, we could go back to the situation pre-1962 and turn a blind eye.'

The problem with grey areas is their tendency to become black and white.

The doctors who see a child in hospital believe absolutely in what their colleagues have published - that what they are seeing is child abuse - and alert social workers and police.

They in turn hire expert witnesses who believe in the abuse diagnosis.

The result is costly.

'Money is certainly wasted pursuing these cases, but I'm more concerned about the human cost,' says Bill Bache, who speaks of distraught parents not allowed to be left alone with their dying child in hospital because they have fallen under suspicion; couples often forced to live separately and encouraged to blame one another; and children denied the comfort of family life.

Yet some children do die of natural but unidentified causes.

Cot deaths, for example, dropped from 30 to seven per week after 1990, when parents were advised not to put babies to sleep on their fronts.

Though they may not acknowledge it, doctors can also cause harm by giving inappropriate treatment.

The routine practice of resuscitating children by putting them on a drip is one that worries Penny Mellor, who campaigns on behalf of parents who claim to be wrongly accused of child abuse.

'If they aren't dehydrated, putting more fluids into them can cause swelling of the brain and bleeding,' she claims.

More information is needed to protect the innocent - children, parents and, indeed, doctors.

Slowly it is emerging.

When the history of false allegations is written there will be a roll-call of honour for those who have taken a fresh look at the medical conundrums and questioned orthodox thinking.

Some Americans will feature:

0: The forensic pathologist Dr John Plunkett, an expert in childhood head injuries;

0: Dr Patrick Lantz, who has been looking at retinal haemorrhages;

0: the biomechanics expert Dr Kirk Thibault, who has looked at the resulting impact when a child has a fall or is shaken;

0: and Dr Chuck Hyman, who has investigated a link between short umbilical cords and weak bones.

British experts will be on that list, too:

0: The chemical pathologist Dr Glyn Walters, who gave evidence about alternative causes of death in the Clark and Gay cases;

0: the neuropathologists Dr Waney Squier, Dr Jennian Geddes and Dr Helen Whitwell, who have found that oxygen deprivation, possibly from choking, can cause brain swelling and bleeding;

0: the geneticist Prof Michael Patton, who has looked at defects that can cause cot death;

0: the ophthalmologist Gillian Adams, who was has raised doubts about retinal haemorrhages being solely indicative of shaking;

0: Prof Nick Bishop, who is investigating why some children fracture easily;

0: and Dr Paul Johnson, who has asked courts to take obstetric history into account.

It is not easy standing against the tide, says Dr Squier, a prosecution witness at the trial of Keran Henderson.

She identified brain damage but said there was no evidence that the child had been shaken, which led to tense discussions among the medical experts.

'As a pathologist I describe what I see,' she said. 'It's not my business to say what caused an injury if I don't know.'

Despite her caution, a dozen experts who were prepared to theorise about shaking won the day and Keran Henderson is now serving a three-year prison sentence.

I asked her husband Iain whether he thinks that, even if exonerated, she will emerge, like Sally Clark, a broken woman.

'I don't know if she'll survive,' he replied.

'She went to prison eight years after Sally Clark. Prisoners aren't stupid, so she hasn't been given such a hard time. I'm hoping that hers is the case that brings about real change.'

Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;

Part Eleven: Think Dirty; Trupti Patel And The Rotten Courts Of Salem: (Simon Jenkins);

Trupti Patel's acquittal prompted one of the most powerful pieces of journalism I have ever read.

It is written by Simon Jenkins who edited The Times from 1990-92 and then went on to contribute a twice weekly column until 2005.

Jenkins, who was knighted for his services to journalism in 2004, was formerly political editor of The Economist and Editor of The Evening Standard.

The column, under the heading " Trupti Patel and the rotten courts of Salem," ran in The Times on June 13, 2003.

"I am walking down the street when out of a sewer swirls a giant black tentacle, waving in my face," Jenkins began.

"It is the ancient Britain lurking beneath the pavement, a place of primitive prejudice which nobody has the guts to reform," he continued.

"It keeps trying to claw the 21st century back to a foetid swamp of cruelty and unfairness.

Along its ghastly surface are rows of suckers, called lawyers.

Yesterday one such tentacle wrapped itself round my brain.

It was the Trupti Patel child murder acquittal.

I realised that modern Britain is ruled by a Government that still throws mothers into jail if they are unlucky enough to have babies that die suddenly.

Civilised countries regard such incidents as personal tragedies, not cause for a state lynching.

In Sweden or Germany, even if the mother is guilty, she is given sympathy and treatment, not handled as a common murderer.

The courts of justice are the same as tried the Salem witches.

They summon juries to pass public judgment on these wretched women, calling in aid a witch-finder general, the hawkish Professor Sir Roy Meadow.

He has no time for classic jurisprudence.

To him a mother is guilty unless “proven otherwise”.

Two cot deaths are suspicious and three are murder.

To hell with any genetic propensity to multiple deaths. This is to be tabloid justice.

New Labour must stand tough on dead babies.

Mrs Patel was Sir Roy’s latest target.

She had a healthy baby and was frantic on the death of their second child.

She and her husband became cot death experts, purchasing copious monitoring equipment.

After a second cot death, the desperate Mrs Patel conceived again and had doctors constantly examine and monitor her baby girl.

When she died after just 22 days, her chest monitor failing to work, Mrs Patel’s attempts at resuscitation broke some of the baby’s ribs.

This and her subsequent acute withdrawal inclined the Crown to prosecute her, in part for “bottling up her grief”.

This mother was acquitted with little thanks to science.

Sir Roy has always been the darling of the prosecution in cot-death cases through his talent for plucking at the emotion of juries.

The case swung Mrs Patel’s way only after her grandmother flew in from India to report on her own loss of five infants to cot death, which she put down to “God’s doing”.

In 1999 Sally Clark had no such luck in her encounter with forensic medicine.

She spent more than three years in jail before winning her release on appeal.

Like Mrs Patel, Mrs Clark saved herself from life in jail only by dint of middle-class determination.

Sir Roy is said to possess the courtroom presence of Judge Danforth in Arthur Miller’s Salem witches play, The Crucible.

He can whip any jury into finding these women guilty.

His fancy theory of “Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy” holds that parents harm their children to draw attention to themselves.

It convinces any jury understandably eager, when asked, to find someone to blame for a child’s death.

Sir Roy is now under (leisurely) investigation by the General Medical Council for his abuse of statistics in Mrs Clark’s trial.

He claimed that her chances of being innocent were 73 million to one against, a figure considered crucial in sending her to jail.

Yet she was clearly innocent and found so on appeal.

Sir Roy’s figures were so palpably wrong that the Royal Statistical Society wrote to the Lord Chancellor to complain.

Nothing was done.

Instead the Crown has continued to use Sir Roy to convict women in such cases.

The system is rotten.

In British trials experts are paid not to help the court with impartial evidence, as is customary in most other countries.

They are paid to lend a veneer of objectivity to one side in the argument.

The hope is that 12 good citizens, the jury, can dig out the truth from this melange of professional bias and emotion.

It is theatre, not justice.

Angela Canning, an otherwise respectable woman, found herself jailed for life last year after the cot deaths of her two children, with Sir Roy appearing against her.

She is in prison awaiting an appeal which is as tardy as the GMC’s investigation of Sir Roy.

Five other mothers are known to be in jail after jury trials for multiple child deaths.

Countless more have had their surviving children taken away from them.

John Batt, a solicitor now campaigning against these imprisonments, describes cases on his books in Glasgow, Hastings, Nottingham, Worcester, Hull, Cardiff and Winchester.

“In each case,” he told The Times, “there was no previous history of abuse and all the friends and relatives say they were loving parents.”

In each case, the Crown produced the same stage army of “child abuse experts” to give evidence against them.

I do not doubt that a very few parents kill their children deliberately.

Such people are sick and need treatment.

Where they have other children, these must be protected, usually by removing them from harm. I cannot see what is achieved by sending the mother to prison for life, except her final destruction.

Even removing the children is a serious matter.

The case of William and Michelle Carter, taken up by the London Evening Standard, saw all four children taken into care after one became sick, in what appears to be a witch-hunt by Sir Roy and Wandsworth Social Services.

This was despite pleas from all who knew the couple, teachers, doctors, even the police, that they could have meant their children no harm.

Mrs Patel did not hurt her first child, whom she loves.

She and her husband were not violent criminals but respectable people enduring the appalling trauma of seeing three children die.

The prosecution case relied on the extraordinary thesis that Mrs Patel was having one child after another to satisfy a craving for murder.

It told the jury to ignore her remorse since it was “an intention to kill that came to Mrs Patel in one moment and left her the next”.

I know such lawyers claim to be only role-playing, to be putting a case, however implausible, before the mercy of the jury.

Perhaps Sir Roy is no more than playing a role too.

Perhaps the whole system is a game of seeing how much public money can be spent on putting women in jail, which Britain does more than any country in Europe.

If so, the system is inhuman and ludicrously inappropriate.

The adversarial system, the distortion of evidence, the onus to prove innocence and the hyping of juries are all medieval and barbaric.

From what I have read, all cot-death convictions involving Sir Roy’s evidence should be considered unsafe and those imprisoned released at once pending review.

Some may consider the Patel verdict a vindication of jury trial.

That is rubbish.

This was a rare case of a jury acquitting in a child murder case only because that case was utterly groundless.

Normally juries, always bound by emotion, convict in such cases.

Attempts by the Government to limit the jury system are being fought by barristers because juries are their Common Agricultural Policy, encouraging lucrative overproduction of trials.

The judicial system appears immune to reform, even by the recent, supposedly radical Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg.

Mrs Clark’s release in January led to pleas for a reform in the use of criminal courts for such cases.

These pleas were ignored. The release coincided with another investigation into a child tragedy.

The Climbie tribunal confronted an administrative failure, of inadequate, ill-led and frightened officials who “allowed” a girl to die at the hands of her guardians.

What happened next was instructive.

Those involved in the Climbie case were castigated and personally destroyed by the tribunal.

The Clark cot-death team were let off scot-free, living to fight another day, including the trial of Mrs Patel.

I find it hard to disagree with those who claim government operates a double standard.

Local government is treated as run by peasants who can be traduced at will.

The judiciary is run by toffs, who can commit any malpractice they like.

Cot deaths should clearly be handled by an examining magistrate in chambers, as in Scandinavia and elsewhere.

The hope is that yesterday’s apparent upheaval in the governance of the judiciary may lead to such a reform.

I doubt it. The new “Constitution” Secretary, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, and the Prime Minister are still lawyers and lawyers are powerfully attached to territory.

Their loyalty to the majesty of the courtroom is as medieval as their love of the adversarial joust.

I cannot see Britain’s judicial Establishment allowing a handful of weeping women and wrecked families to erode their precious turf.

Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;

Part Ten: Thinking Dirty; Its Role in The Decision To Charge Trupti Patel With Murdering Her Babies;

"NURSES WHO VISITED MRS PATEL AT HOME HAD REPORTED THAT SHE SEEMED DISTANT AND REFUSED HELP.

IN FACT, MRS PATEL WAS DESPERATELY TRYING NOT TO BECOME AN OVERANXIOUS MOTHER.

TO JENNY THOMAS, CHAIRMAN OF THE CHILD BEREAVEMENT TRUST, THIS WAS A PERFECTLY NORMAL PROCESS OF EMOTIONS FOR AN ASIAN FAMILY WHO HAD SUFFERED SO MANY DEATHS.

TO THE POLICE, HOWEVER, WHO CONSIDERED HER REACTIONS ABNORMAL, IT WAS A CAUSE FOR SUSPICION."

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"DURING THE TRIAL IT EMERGED THAT THE BABIES PROBABLY DIED FROM A RARE, NEWLY DISCOVERED GENE DISORDER KNOWN AS LONG QT SYNDROME, WHICH MISSES A GENERATION BEFORE STRIKING AGAIN. MRS PATEL’S 80-YEAR-OLD GRANDMOTHER TRAVELLED FROM INDIA TO REVEAL HOW SHE HAD LOST FIVE OF HER 12 CHILDREN. THREE OF THOSE DEATHS WERE LINKED TO THE DISORDER."

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HELEN STUDD: THE TIMES ON-LINE;

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As I learned more about the Patel case, I wondered how many other parents and caregivers were wrongfully charged with killing children - in the absence of concrete evidence - because a pathologist or social worker made unwarranted social assumptions about their character.

The role that false assumptions played in the Patel case is described by reporter Helen Studd in a story which appeared in the on-line version of The Times on June 12, 2003, under the heading: "Grieving mother learnt to keep her tears private."

The story appeared under the sub-heading: "Cultural differences left neighbours with the impression of a cold and heartless woman."

"The lonely tears of Trupti Patel, heard by neighbours through the walls of her house, belied her appearance as a cold, heartless mother unmoved by the deaths of three babies," the story began.

"Mrs Patel’s childhood in an Asian community had taught her to keep her grief private, even from her own mother, while her success as a career woman only reinforced her image of outward self-control," it continued.

"To a large extent, it was the cultural differences between her reserved upbringing and the more emotionally demonstrative British society that landed her in the dock at Reading Crown Court.

While those with experience of the bereavement process recognise that Hindu families grieve differently, Mrs Patel’s dearth of public tears appeared unfeeling to outsiders.

Thames Valley Police refused to believe that three cot deaths in one family could be anything other than murder.

Three ordinary cardboard boxes stacked in a wardrobe at the marital home bear the names of Amar, Jamie and Mia.

Inside are their birth and death certificates together with photographs, imprints of their feet, copies of their fingerprints and locks of hair.

Mrs Patel’s family emigrated to Britain from the Punjab in 1965 and she was born in Bolton, Lancashire, two years later.

Her childhood was a mixture of Asian and Western influences. She won a place at the town’s grammar school, developing a love of chemistry.

She studied pharmacy at King’s College London, and Greenwich Hospital.

While working towards her pre-registration qualification at Greenwich in 1990, she was introduced to Jayant Kumar Patel, a recently qualified electronics engineer, by a mutual aunt.

After seven months together the couple decided to get married.

Before the wedding she gave up her job in Greenwich and moved back to Bolton to help her parents with the preparations.

The marriage took place at a register office in Bolton, followed by a traditional Hindu ceremony, in June 1991.

After the wedding, the couple moved in with Mr Patel’s parents, whom she had met only twice before the ceremony.

For two years she lived in a house with her in-laws.

Mrs Patel soon began to find life cramped and lonely, with her husband working 200 miles away in Maidenhead, so, in 1993, the couple moved south, buying a modern three-bedroom semi-detached house, now worth £250,000, near Mr Patel’s workplace.

“It was nice to have space and privacy,” she told police. “We were very happy together.”

Mrs Patel threw herself into her career as a pharmacist at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, soon rising to the position of dispensary manager in charge of 13 staff.

The couple began to discuss the possibility of having children.

After one last exotic holiday together to Hong Kong, Malaysia and Bali, they started trying for a family.

After Mrs Patel became pregnant, a year later, she suffered a miscarriage.

Only three months later she was pregnant again.

Her first child, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was born by emergency caesarean after a 20-hour labour in 1995.

She was disappointed to learn that she would be unable to return to work on a part-time basis.

“I have no high goals,” she told the police. “I had achieved what I always said I would achieve. I did not want to go higher up the ladder.”

As her next three children died one by one from cot death, she became increasingly unable to cope.

With each death, she became increasingly resigned, afraid to grieve too long in case she was going against divine will.

Second Part;

She was also determined to get over the babies’ deaths quickly in order to prevent her feelings of grief passing to the next child.

Publicly, she threw herself back into work, while privately she was devastated and would spend long hours in tears.

Neighbours could hear her crying after her husband had left in the mornings.

Even during her trial, she gave the jury only occasional glimpses of her real feelings, when she could no longer control her weeping.

Her son Amar was the first to die, in 1997.

Mrs Patel found he had stopped breathing when she went to wake him for his feed.

Mrs Patel, who had trained in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, tried frantically to save him, helped by a 999 operator she telephoned.

But Amar was dead within the hour. The cause of his death was given as sudden infant death syndrome.

Mrs Patel became subdued, which to outsiders appeared as if she did not care.

Before she conceived again, she attended a conference in London into cot deaths and investigated monitors available to detect respiratory problems in babies.

Before her next baby, Jamie, was born in 1999, Mrs Patel changed the carpets and curtains at home, fearing that dust mites might have been responsible for Amar’s death.

Two weeks after Jamie’s birth, his father found him “lifeless” in his carrycot.

The panicking couple battled to revive him.

A helicopter took the baby to hospital, where doctors fought for 12 hours to save his life, but he died from a massive fit.

Again, the death was attributed to sudden infant death syndrome.

While Mrs Patel was pregnant with her fourth child in 2000, she began eating organic foods.

Mia was born on May 14, 2001, at Wexham Park Hospital. Mother and baby were monitored around the clock.

Mia was transferred to the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, for specific heart, breathing and sleep-pattern monitoring. A week later she was allowed home.

A breathing monitor was placed under her cot mattress to signal an alarm if she developed problems.

Mrs Patel was unhappy with the device and wanted a more sophisticated version to strap to Mia’s chest.

Her fears over the performance of the device later proved well-founded.

After only a few days Mia began to vomit and Mrs Patel took her to the family GP, who said her condition would improve.

Back home Mr Patel took photographs of his wife cuddling Mia in bed.

Hours later, Mrs Patel found the baby apparently lifeless in her cot. The alarm had failed to activate.

Mrs Patel raced down stairs, clutching Mia, desperately forcing short breaths into her limp baby. The 22-day-old baby died at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

This time, a post-mortem examination found four broken ribs in the baby’s chest.

Nurses who visited Mrs Patel at home had reported that she seemed distant and refused help.

In fact, Mrs Patel was desperately trying not to become an overanxious mother.

To Jenny Thomas, chairman of the Child Bereavement Trust, this was a perfectly normal process of emotions for an Asian family who had suffered so many deaths.

To the police, however, who considered her reactions abnormal, it was a cause for suspicion.

During the trial it emerged that the babies probably died from a rare, newly discovered gene disorder known as long QT syndrome, which misses a generation before striking again.

Mrs Patel’s 80-year-old grandmother travelled from India to reveal how she had lost five of her 12 children.

Three of those deaths were linked to the disorder."

Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com

Part Nine; Think Dirty; Trupti Patel; Another Victim Of "Meadow's Law;"

"AFTER THE TRIAL STARTED, TWO KEY PROSECUTION WITNESSES WHO HAD EXAMINED MIA'S BODY AND HAD DISPUTED MRS PATEL'S CLAIM THAT THE FRACTURED RIBS WERE CAUSED BY HER ATTEMPTS AT RESUSCITATION, SAID THAT THEY WERE NO LONGER SURE. PROFESSOR RUPERT RISDON, A PAEDIATRIC PATHOLOGIST, WROTE TO THE JUDGE SAYING THAT HE HAD FOUND EVIDENCE OF RIB FRACTURES CAUSED BY RESUSCITATION IN THREE CHILDREN THAT HE HAD EXAMINED IN THE PREVIOUS MONTH ALONE, AND NATHANIEL CAREY, A HOME OFFICE PATHOLOGIST, SAID HE COULD "NO LONGER STATE CATEGORICALLY THAT THE RIB FRACTURES WERE NOT DUE TO RESUSCITATION."

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Trupti Patel went through the hellish experience of being charged with killing three of her babies on the opinion of Sir Roy Meadow.

As the author of a note in Wikipedia pointed out: "Sir Roy's dictum that "one sudden infant death in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless proven otherwise" became known as "Meadow's Law."

"Meadow's Law" unfortunately did not take into consideration that Patel might suffer from an undiscovered genetic defect: Her maternal grandmother had lost five children in infancy,

"Trupti Patel is a qualified pharmacist from Berkshire, England, who was acquitted in 2003 of murdering three of her children," the note begins.

"The three children were Amar (5 September 1997–10 December 1997), Jamie (21 June 1999–6 July 1999), and Mia (14 May 2001–5 June 2001)," it continues.

"Trupti Patel was born into a family of Punjabis who had moved from India to England.

She spent her childhood in Lancashire, and attended grammar school.

She then went to study at King's College London, where she gained a B.Sc. in pharmacy.

Around this time, she met her future husband, Jayant, a qualified electrical engineer who later worked as a business analyst for British Telecom.

They were married within seven months, and their first child, a girl, was born in 1995.

Their second child, a boy, died unexpectedly at the age of two months, in December 1997.

Eighteen months later, another boy died aged just fifteen days.

Postmortem examinations yielded no explanations for the deaths, but a daughter who died at the age of twenty-two days in June 2001 was found to have four broken ribs.

A police investigation was started, which led to Trupti Patel's arrest in May 2002. She was charged with the murder of her three babies.

The case, which was heard at Reading crown court, was one of a number of famous court cases in Britain in which mothers who reported more than one cot death were accused of murder.

It was also one of a number of cases in which evidence was given by Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a controversial paediatrician whose testimony helped to convict Sally Clark, Angela Cannings, and Donna Anthony of murdering their babies; all three women were cleared on appeal.

Sir Roy's dictum that "one sudden infant death in a family is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless proven otherwise" became known as "Meadow's Law",[3] and his claim that the likelihood of two babies dying from natural causes in the same family was one in 73 million prompted the Royal Statistical Society to write a letter of complaint to the Lord Chancellor, stating that the figure had "no statistical basis";[4] other experts said that when genetic and environmental factors were taken into account, the figure was closer to one in 200.

Sir Roy Meadow, giving evidence for the prosecution, listed four indications of Mrs Patel's guilt. One was the injuries suffered by the third child to die.

Mrs Patel's explanation was that the rib fractures had resulted from her attempts at resuscitation.

The second and third points were that the children had had several medical examinations, and had been well until shortly before their deaths.

The fourth point was that three consecutive children had died, and that, according to Sir Roy, "in general, sudden and unexpected death does not run in families."

One of the defence witnesses was genetics specialist Professor Michael Patton, who testified that several cot deaths in the same family could be caused by an undiscovered genetic defect, and that the chances of experiencing more than one cot death could be as high as one in twenty.

The court heard evidence that Mrs Patel's maternal grandmother had lost five children in infancy, but that her remaining seven children were "alive and well".

By the time the case came to court, Sir Roy's claims about the likelihood of a second cot death in the same family had been largely discredited.

Sally Clark's conviction for the murder of her sons had been overturned some months earlier, and Angela Cannings's guilt was disputed by many.

After the trial started, two key prosecution witnesses who had examined Mia's body and had disputed Mrs Patel's claim that the fractured ribs were caused by her attempts at resuscitation, said that they were no longer sure.

Professor Rupert Risdon, a paediatric pathologist, wrote to the judge saying that he had found evidence of rib fractures caused by resuscitation in three children that he had examined in the previous month alone, and Nathaniel Carey, a Home Office pathologist, said he could "no longer state categorically that the rib fractures were not due to resuscitation."

On 11 June 2003, at the end of a six-and-a-half week trial, thirty-five-year-old Trupti Patel was acquitted of all charges.

She announced shortly after her acquittal that her husband would have a vasectomy, as they were unwilling to take the risk of having another child.

A court order had been imposed on her after the death of Mia in 2001,[10] forbidding her to be alone with her, or to cook for her, and that order remained in force following her acquittal."

Next Posting: "Part Nine: Think Dirty: How a misunderstanding of cultural differences led to Trupti Patel being charged with murdering her babies."

Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;

Part Eight: Think Dirty; Angela Canning's Personal Agony: Interview with The New Statesman;

It must be difficult to imagine the agony that an innocent mother must fell when convicted and imprisoned for killing a child.

Angela Cannings gives us a taste of the personal hell she experienced after being charged with murdering her two babies in an interview with reporter Viv Groskop, published in the New Statesman on Sept. 13, 2004, under the heading, ''In prison, I was lowest of the low.'' (A previous post presented the terrible price paid by Sally Clark);

The Editor tells us that, "Viv Groskop talks to Angela Cannings, one of three mothers last year cleared of multiple baby murders, and asks if she can ever repair her shattered life."

"Is it too naive to think that we may never see another innocent mother imprisoned for murdering her children?," the article containing the interview begins;

"The report published on 6 September by a working group of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the Royal College of Pathologists, chaired by the Labour peer Helena Kennedy QC, wants future decisions to prosecute to be made only after a multi-professional review," it continues;

"It also says that post-mortem examinations of babies who have died suddenly and mysteriously should be carried out by specialist paediatric pathologists.

These are among several welcome safeguards, but they will do nothing to help the women whose cases prompted the review.

They include Angela Cannings who, like the solicitor Sally Clark and the pharmacist Trupti Patel, was released from prison last year after her conviction for multiple baby murders was overturned.

Cannings was sentenced to life imprisonment in April 2002 after she had suffered three cot deaths.

Like Clark and Patel, she finds that nobody is much interested in her now that her innocence has been established and justice done.

But you do not simply slot back into your old life, she argues.

She has tried to stay positive and enjoy being reunited with her husband, Terry, and her daughter, Jade, aged eight, but it has not been easy.

"Since Sally Clark's release," Cannings says, "we've found out that she has struggled very badly.

I can understand that, because I think I struggle with it inwardly. I don't feel I can offload all my thoughts and feelings on Terry, because he's doing [the same thing] to me, and by lunchtime most days we can end up feeling very low and depressed." However, she forces herself to be optimistic. "I have been given that chance to be back at home with my husband and daughter, and I'm grabbing every opportunity to get something back of what we had."

These women have to deal with the aftermath of months spent in prison as well as the effects on the children they left behind, and with being denied the chance to grieve for their dead babies.

For Sally Clark, recovery has been painful, public and seemingly impossible.

In June this year, the official account of her story was published (Stolen Innocence: a mother's fight for justice), but she was too upset to give interviews.

At the time, her husband, Steve, also a lawyer, said that she finds it hard to leave the house.

"Sally still isn't well, and she never will be well again. She has written all this stuff, but she doesn't want to see it. It upsets her. She would really rather this wasn't happening. She is not the happy, confident person she was before this happened to her. She is vulnerable, she has panic attacks, she gets flustered by things that most of us just deal with. She constantly feels that people are judging her, and it is a vicious circle."

Adjusting to life with the son who was taken away from her has been just as much of a struggle.

Trupti Patel has also given no interviews.

Despite the not guilty verdict, a court order prevents her from spending time alone with her surviving daughter.

Her babies Amar, Jamie and Mia all died aged less than three months between 1997 and 2001.

At her appeal, her 80-year-old grandmother travelled from India to give evidence that she herself had had five babies who died of unexplained causes.

The judge concluded that Patel's babies may have had a rare inherited predisposition to cot death. Outside the court, her solicitor said: "Few mothers will ever experience the death of a baby, let alone the death of three. Virtually no mother, however, will have to face the trauma of being accused of deliberately suffocating her children."

All three women's stories are complicated beyond imagining.

Prison and wrongful conviction are just half of it.

As Cannings points out, even before she was convicted, she had to undergo virtual house arrest for almost two years while the police gathered evidence.

During this investigation, her sister got married; social services insisted that Cannings's mother supervise all contact with Jade during the wedding, and Cannings was allowed only one drink of alcohol - the wedding toast.

All of Cannings's visits to her daughter, then a toddler, were severely restricted and monitored.

For four years, of which 21 months were spent in prison, she was not allowed to spend any time alone with Jade, and so could not live in the same house as her husband.

It is unthinkable the strain this would put on any marriage, let alone on a parent's relationship with a small child.

Since Cannings's release last December, she, Terry and Jade have left Salisbury in Wiltshire, where the three babies died, and made a new start in Plymouth.

Terry gave up his job as a bakery manager at Tesco to look after Jade while his wife was in prison, and so the family lives on state benefits.

The couple are both looking for work.

"We've lost four years of family life," Cannings says, "and we never had a chance to grieve for Matthew [the son whose death in 1999 prompted her arrest].
That's still to come for me. But we've started afresh and we are getting used to being together.

"It was a complete shock for me to be back in the family home again, getting used to doing things like housework. I'm learning more about Terry and Jade and what they had to do to cope. Jade has had to learn to dress herself, to plait her own hair. She doesn't even let me brush her hair, because she has always done it herself. She doesn't know any different."

Cannings also finds it hard to forget the press coverage at the time.

When she received her life sentence, she was vilified by the newspapers as the worst of criminals.

In prison, she received the kind of treatment reserved for paedophiles and child murderers.

"I was the lowest of the low in prison," she says, "because people who harm their babies are unthinkable. I was physically and verbally attacked. I found it strange: you are in a prison and still people judge you. It wasn't like you just get on with your sentence - it's all backchat and people judging what you are in for. The first couple of months were the worst because it was in the news, on all the front pages, with the heading 'Baby killer'. I had been labelled and there was nothing I could do. I just kept thinking, 'This isn't me.' But it's very hard to try and tell people: 'Actually, this isn't right.'"

Cannings admits that there are still days when she feels very depressed, but says it helps to know that other families have survived what her family has gone through.

That knowledge has played a significant part in helping her to pick up her life again.

She also thinks of the thousands of other families that have been affected by the theory that a high proportion of unexplained baby deaths are attributable to Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, in which parents harm their children in order to get sympathy and attention.

The theory - associated mainly with Sir Roy Meadow, a senior paediatrician whose testimony played a role in the convictions of Cannings, Clark and Patel - is now largely discredited.

As a result, up to 258 criminal cases and possibly another 5,000 civil cases, which nearly always result in children being removed from their parents' care, are under review.

"We have been involved in campaigning with families up and down the country who have had their children taken away," says Cannings. "Obviously, the authorities do have to investigate any accusations of child abuse. But you have to look at these cases: if there is no clear-cut evidence, why ruin a family's life?

"It saddens me that it took four years for us - but as a family, we hope that in time the memory will fade. Our hope for the future is that we never, ever see a case like that again.""

Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com'

Part Seven; Think Dirty: Angela Cannings; Another Vulnerable Mother's Grief;

"EVEN MORE SAD AND BAFFLING IS THAT PROF. ROY MEADOW SHOULD HAVE BEEN CALLED IN, AFTER THE DERISION AROUSED BY HIS EVIDENCE AT THE TRIAL OF MRS SALLY CLARK, AND THAT JURIES SHOULD STILL BE MESMERIZED BY HIM."

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"DURING THE LAST FEW YEARS WE HAVE GONE FROM A COUNTRY THAT SHARED THE GRIEF OF MOTHERS LOSING THEIR INFANTS WITHOUT KNOWN CAUSE TO THE SITUATION TODAY WHERE WE DAMN THEM FOR THE SAME TRAGEDY.

AFTER EVERY SUDDEN INFANT DEATH THERE IS NOW WHAT IS EUPHEMISTICALLY CALLED A “DEATH SCENE INVESTIGATION.”

ITS SOLE PURPOSE IS TO SEE IF A PARENT OR CARER CAN CONCEIVABLY BE SUSPECTED OF HAVING COMMITTED MURDER.

THE DOCTORS INVOLVED ARE SELECTED BECAUSE THEY DECLARE BELIEF IN “THINKING DIRTY.”

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"IF YOU’RE A GRIEVING MOTHER OR A NANNY, SHOCKED OUT OF YOUR WITS BY THE DEATH OF AN INFANT, THEN GOD HELP YOU, THE LAW IS INTENT ON RIPPING YOU APART.

THE PROSECUTION’S INVESTIGATORS USE THE NATURAL INSTINCT OF THE PARENTS WHO WANT A THOROUGH INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSE THEIR OUTPOURING OF GRIEF TO SEE IF THERE IS THE SLIGHTEST POSSIBILITY OF FOUL PLAY.

HAVE YOU SHAKEN THE BABY? A LOADED QUESTION, FOR IF YOU SAY YES, YOU HAVE GIVEN THE PROSECUTION A CONVICTION FOR SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME.

IF YOU DENY IT, YOU’RE PROBABLY A LIAR, FOR ALL BABIES ARE SHAKEN, IF ONLY IN AN EXPRESSION OF HAPPINESS.

IF YOU WERE NOT THERE TO SHAKE THE CHILD, YOU BECOME SUSPECTED OF HAVING LEFT THE BABY ALONE, TO SUFFOCATE."

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Angela Cannings, like Sally Clark, was wrongly convicted in the death of her children, after "thinking dirty" in the case of an infant's death was once again permitted to stain Britain's criminal justice system.

The Cannings case - as did prosecution of Sally Clark - involved an expert witness named Sir Roy Meadow;

By way of brief introduction, Wikipedia tells us that:

"Angela Cannings was wrongfully convicted in the UK in 2002 of the murder of her seven-week-old son, Jason, who died in 1991, and of her 18-week-old son Matthew, who died in 1999.

Her first child, Gemma, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in 1989 at the age of 13 weeks, although she was never charged in connection with Gemma's death.

Her conviction (for which she received life imprisonment) was based on claims that she had smothered the children, but was overturned as unsafe by the Court of Appeal on 10 December 2003.

[1] Cannings was convicted after the involvement in her case of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a controversial pediatrician who was later struck off, then reinstated, by the General Medical Council.

The Cannings case was re-examined after a BBC "Real Story" investigation showed that her paternal great-grandmother had suffered one sudden infant death and her paternal grandmother two.

Professor Michael Patton, a clinical geneticist at St George's Hospital Medical School told the BBC that a genetic inheritance was the most likely explanation for the cot deaths in the family......

Expert witness Professor Sir Roy Meadow was later temporarily struck off the General Medical Council register partly as a result of his evidence at the Cannings trial.

Meadow based his calculations on the likelihood of a second cot death being the same as the likelihood of a first, whereas in households where one cot death has taken place, the probability of another is greatly increased.

He also asserted that as the children were previously in good health, this made cot death implausible (which was contrary to the opinion of other specialists).

Cannings later said Meadow should be "severely punished" for his testimony in her case and others."

I have been left both sad and angry after reading an article published after Cannings was convicted by by Ken Norman,chairman of a campaign to free Cannings, and John Fryer who is a described a supporter of the campaign- called the Portia campaign - and a retired independent scientist, toxic chemicals and their effects on health.

"On Tuesday 16th April 2002, Angela Cannings was convicted of the murder of her two sons Jason and Matthew," the article, headed "Free Angela Cannings" began.

"She was given a double life sentence," it continued.

" Her first child was stillborn; the second, Gemma, died 14 months before Jason, on November 14, 1989, and the prosecution claims that this was the “backdrop” to the two later deaths, on January 13, 1991 and November 12, 1999.

(Question: What the devil does “backdrop” mean? Answer: There was not the slightest evidence that Gemma was murdered, but the jury was made to realise that she might have been.)

Wiltshire police said they were sad and baffled by the case.

“I feel tremendous sympathy for her because she strikes me as a nice woman,” said Det. Sergt Rob Findley.

Even more sad and baffling is that Prof. Roy Meadow should have been called in, after the derision aroused by his evidence at the trial of Mrs Sally Clark, and that juries should still be mesmerized by him.

If guilty Angela deserves the sentence, unless there was mental/emotional breakdown, as the judge supposed.

Many people will suppose that she has had a fair trial.

The problem is that the conviction is neither fair nor just.

Gemma was born by Caesarean section; so was Jason, who suffered from dislocated hips and had to have a splint.

Nine days before his death a health visitor had to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after finding him apparently lifeless.

She found Angela screaming, “It’s happened again.”

Matthew also suffered “acute life-threatening events” nine days before he died and, according to Paul Dunkels QC, prosecuting, these had been earlier attempts to smother.

(But why should attempts to smother babies end in failure?

Two minutes with a hand or pillow held over the face could not fail to kill.

A more fair opinion would be that these were apnoea attacks).

Angela’s second cousin lost two children due to cot death, and this indicates inherited mitochondrial mutation (inherited from the mother’s family, not from the husband; it can bring more than one-in-four risk of infant death).

Angela is now serving a sentence that even the judge considers to be inhuman - double life imprisonment - to complete the misery of these events.

Judge Dame Heather Hallett, 52, who has two sons of her own, said while passing the mandatory sentence, “There is no medical evidence before the court to suggest there was anything wrong with you at the time of the deaths of your children, but I have no doubt that for a woman like you to have committed these terrible acts of suffocating your own babies, there must have been something seriously wrong with you.”

Suggesting that post-natal depression was a factor, she continued: “This in my judgement is a classic kind of injustice that can be caused by mandatory sentencing. In my opinion you will be no threat to anyone in the future.”

It would have been only a minor step from this almost unprecedented expression of sympathy for the judge to have considered her innocent.

The likelihood is that Angela never has been a risk to children.

The jury took more than nine hours to unanimously decide that the babies were smothered (indicating that some jurors had to be argued out of their own beliefs) and in a front-page report the Daily Mail added the words “even though medical experts were unable to find clear proof of suffocation.”

Can we say for certain that she is an innocent victim?

No, but neither can we say that any person picked up at random has not committed murder.

Some people are vile and evil and some of these may be involved in the case – but if you were to ask, “Was it Angela?” we would say, “Not likely.”

She is like many other mums throughout the world who have suffered the loss of a child or children from Sudden Infant Cot Death Syndrome - termed a syndrome because there is no one cause that has yet been identified.

(The study of genetics is only in its infancy).

During the last few years we have gone from a country that shared the grief of mothers losing their infants without known cause to the situation today where we damn them for the same tragedy.

After every sudden infant death there is now what is euphemistically called a “Death Scene Investigation.”

Its sole purpose is to see if a parent or carer can conceivably be suspected of having committed murder.

The doctors involved are selected because they declare belief in “thinking dirty.”

Several large-scale studies (one published in 2001) have concluded that only three to six percent of cot deaths result from deliberate neglect or abuse, including murder, but “dirty thinkers” declare that 40% of cot deaths are actually murder; the consequence is that 37 out of every 40 prosecutions for child murder are highly controversial - even among paediatric pathologists - and yet the scales of justice are loaded even further than this.

If you’re a grieving mother or a nanny, shocked out of your wits by the death of an infant, then God help you, the law is intent on ripping you apart.

The Prosecution’s investigators use the natural instinct of the parents who want a thorough investigation and analyse their outpouring of grief to see if there is the slightest possibility of foul play.

Have you shaken the baby? A loaded question, for if you say yes, you have given the prosecution a conviction for Shaken Baby Syndrome.

If you deny it, you’re probably a liar, for all babies are shaken, if only in an expression of happiness.

If you were not there to shake the child, you become suspected of having left the baby alone, to suffocate.

An apnoea alarm had been given to Angela after the first death (which was therefore professionally believed to have been due to breathing failure).

It went off, and another death occurred. Angela said she had failed to hear it, and presumably told the investigators, in anguish, “If only I had been listening.”

This became additional grounds for prosecution - did she ignore the alarm?
Yet it’s only like a telephone bell; how often have you been indoors, or nearby, and failed to hear the phone ring?

The benefit of hindsight is remarkable.

Everything the parent does is analysed in the greatest detail for deviation from assumed normal behaviour.

How can a mother who has suffered the loss of a previous baby have what we would imagine is normal behaviour?

After losing possibly the most precious person in your life you cannot be normal. Everything you say or do will be anything but normal.

The consequence is that whatever you do will be construed as strange.

Just put yourself in the position of losing a child.

Would any reaction be considered normal?

Tears? They’re crocodile. A brave face? You’re a hard brute.”

You have misery that no one would wish upon their worst enemy.

Perhaps you decide to get rid of any sign that the first infant ever existed – and that eventually becomes evidence of murder.

It was devastating evidence (used against Angela) that she was at home alone with the children when they died.

Surely all mothers ARE alone with their infants for much of their life?

It is considered evidence of crime to have further children only months after a death . . . but isn’t this evidence that a devastated mother has unsatisfied maternal longings that she cannot endure?

If in fact it had become intolerable living with one baby, so that she had been driven to murder, how on earth could this give need for a second pregnancy?

How does a mother know what has happened to cause the loss of a child when cause of a first death is recorded as unknown?

There are various possibilities.

The baby may have been too hot or too cold, or placed face-down; the parents smoke, the mattress or quilt was too soft, the child could slip down beneath blankets.

These are just a few of the many factors that parents have been warned about.

The Cannings were warned that their smoking might have caused a child’s death.

So they gave up smoking to avoid any more losses. It didn’t work for them. It was not the fatal factor.

They may have lost babies because of toxicity – one possibility is that the mum herself carried toxicity and was feeding a slow death to her infants.

In Asia parents have the lowest cot death rate in the world, yet babies are put to sleep in the more dangerous positions.

In short there are no easy answers.

In Hong Kong for example the death rate was 0.04 whereas in New Zealand it stood 100 times this rate at 4.00 – all per 1,000 live births.

Doctors claim subtle differences in using hard mattresses, not smoking, changing the angle at which babies lie, but the change in the rate of cot death is less than 10 percent of the regional variation around the world.

Something does not add up. Something is clearly not right.

At Angela’s trial, the defence argued that two babies other than Gemma and Jason had died within two years in the tiny hamlet of Winterbourne Gunner - “a very unusual event and there may be something in the evidence about Winterbourne Gunner that tells you about the toxins inside a baby and toxins in the environment.”


The Guardian reported: “The Wiltshire hamlet is near the Ministry of Defence nuclear biological and chemical centre at Porton Down, and the defence is expected to argue the deaths could be connected to residues of materials or poisons left at the site.”

“Earlier the court heard from Group Captain Ian McPhee, a former commandant of the nuclear biological and chemical centre, who said an independent civilian survey [How independent?] had found ‘no gross contamination of the land or the water table’ and had detected no chemical or nerve agents.

“But the officer added that during an operation to clear the land between November 1998 and July 1999, 1,088 munitions were recovered to add to a previous total of 108 [ten times as many - presumably after the ‘independent civilian survey’].

Of the earlier discoveries, two munitions contained mustard and lewisite blister agents that would cause breathing difficulties, and one of phosgene - a pulmonary agent that attacks the lungs and causes the victim to ‘dry drown’ as the lungs reduce.”

Porton Down is a place dedicated to delivering death as quickly and as undetectably as possible to an enemy.

In fact at the same time as the Wiltshire Police were prosecuting and convicting Angela there was a parallel investigation into death at this establishment.

Curiously the death of Ronald Maddison, which happened in the 1950’s, is still being investigated while that of Angela’s children who died up to forty years later has just reached a successful conclusion. (Successful if you like to lock up an innocent person for two lifetimes.)

For Ronald Maddison the charge could result in the UK Government and the scientists being charged with murder.

This of course cannot be allowed to happen.

Our claim is that Angela’s children died because of the chemical insidiousness of a group of chemicals chosen as the weapon of choice to terminate life – all forms of life.

These chemicals are called nerve toxic organophosphates – made by man to destroy the nervous system of all animal life with a nervous system inside them – our nervous system is 95% similar to that of a fly.

The data of the killing power of these chemicals is awesome – you cannot imagine how dangerous they are.

With old nerve toxins dumped for 80 years in the field next door, the risk to her children was incalculable.

When you ask what OP flame retardants are in mattresses, the answer is that this is a trade secret.

In 1969 cancer-inducing, nerve-destroying life-taking chemical was put into nightclothing for infants between the ages of one month and six months – because this was the age they were vulnerable to catching their nightclothes alight and dying of burns from an open fire.

The flame retardants were perhaps more lethal than the original risk. The number of cot deaths has multiplied.

A friend who worked in the ambulance service through the 1980’s tells me of the build up in cases in a small village to the point where there were three deaths in one week.

Not all cot deaths are due to a particular OP nerve toxic, of course. Carbon monoxide is a similar acting toxin.

Drugs can kill, thalidomide kills as well as disables.

A whole group of phenothiazines have been proven to cause cot death.

Phenothiazines and tobacco smoke kill, but are relatively non-toxic in comparison to OP’s and are used in lesser amounts.

Then you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that OP nerve toxins designed to kill fleas, etc., and used in large amounts around infants presents a clear and present risk.

As we write this, a recent court ruling means hundreds of people suffering from mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos, can no longer claim compensation because they may have become contaminated at any one of scores of sites.

Years ago a hard-working doctor showed that thalidomide had a less than desirable effect on new-born babies – they had defective arms or legs.

In less than two years he was struck off the medical register.

A director of the company that supplied this drug got a knighthood.

I (John Fryer) know a thalidomide victim.

She was born with a defective hand.

Her twin brother was a deformed thalidomide victim born dead.

There was just one problem – although my friend’s mother took thalidomide, she could not prove it.

So she is not recognized as a thalidomide case and does not show up on the government figures.

Neither does the twin brother; he was a bit of waste down the hospital sluice, just part of the after-birth.


We do have a peer-reviewed paper showing that an 80% death rate among children is possible in a small village next to a source of OP nerve toxins.

This is not Winterbourne Gunner, of course, but a small European village called Rinya, where the population availed themselves of some easy-to-catch fish.

They did not know that the fish had been made ill by an OP product, and a carnage of infants followed.

In fairness, when it was recognised that risk existed around Porton Down, men in space-suits cleared up a lot of mess.

They claimed that the 100 or so glass phials found were intact, complete with life-destroying nerve agents sealed in safely.

They were less forthcoming about 1,000 remnants of phials picked up at the same time.

Angela can be seen to have at least four exposures to nerve-destroying toxins:


1. The chemical establishment;

2. The dumped of nerve agents;

3. At home she used OP flea spray on her dog – diazinon or chlorpyrifos, one withdrawn and the other banned for use in the home - perhaps because of experiences like Angela’s but not admitted;

4. In the mattress used by Matthew there was an OP flame retardant – probably TCP or tricresyl phosphate. In 1932 a few drops spilled on to a worker; he died, but production and sales went ahead;


Fire risk has diminished with the open coal fire; children’s clothes do not spontaneously burst into flame when near a radiator.

Clearly OP’s are a risk and it seems that babies are more sensitive than adults.

Angela to this day may have OP’s still in her body, as a result of time spent at Winterbourne Gunner, bringing possibility of death to any child she suckled.

If she is to serve two life sentences in prison this can hardly matter.

But she told the court, when asked how she felt after Matthew died: “I really did not know what I had done in my life to deserve to lose my children. Each time I felt empty inside and wondered why it had all happened.
“Throughout all of this it has been a struggle, but my husband Terry and I are still married. We are still as together as we can be - and he fully supports me.
“The one thing that I have regretted since I have lost Matthew was that I had arranged to be sterilised early in my pregnancy with him. To this day I would still try again for another baby if I hadn’t been sterilised.
“It is nothing to do with replacing the babies that I have lost. I don’t understand how or why or what I have done to deserve all this sadness.”

Was Prof Roy Meadow giving deliberately false evidence when claiming Angela was a murderess for example simply because she lost Matthew at 9.30am and not 7.30am when she was not alone with the child? Of course not.

Was Professor Berry a liar when he found “every sign of cot death” and asked for murder charges to be brought if justified? Of course not.

But neither should we accept what they say as being evidence of murder when other expert evidence could contradict them.

Helping to convict Mrs Sally Clark of supposedly murdering two of her three children, Meadow solemnly assured the jury that odds against a single cot death in an affluent family were 1,850 to one, therefore for two deaths the odds became 1 in 73 million.

This has been met with derision by mathematicians and paediatricians.

Yet he was still allowed to give evidence convicting Angela.

By his peculiar maths, three deaths would involve odds of one in 129,500 billions - more children than have ever been born.

Coming back to reality, Ms Michelle Horton, of Northfield, Birmingham, lost three infants to cot death, all in fairly identical circumstances to Angela, but could not be prosecuted because one of the deaths occurred in hospital when she was nowhere near.

(She still had the word “murderer” daubed on her door by someone with similar mentality to Meadow).

Another expert view concerning Mrs Clark came from Professor Emeritus of Medical Genetics Brian Lowry, of Calgary, who wrote that “while most [cot death] cases are non-genetic or of unknown origin, nevertheless a few are genetic.

Mrs Clark’s risk of a second affected child could be 25 percent, or even higher in the case of a mitochondrial mutation.

There was a case in the US a few years ago where a mother was convicted of murder based on a cot death.

She was pregnant when she went to prison and gave birth there; the baby was removed and placed in foster care.

This baby subsequently died under similar circumstances to the first.

Investigation of the first baby’s death disclosed that the experts who said the death was due to glycol (anti-freeze) poisoning had made a mistake.

The mother was subsequently released.

“These parents had a 25 per cent risk of subsequent children having the same disorder and dying suddenly in infancy.”

There is a huge amount of material on the world-wide web showing that cot deaths - even multiple ones - are likely to be natural.

A BBC report, April 16, 2002, describes Sudden Infant Death Syndrome as “a mysterious condition for which the cause is not known.

It is estimated that seven babies die for no apparent reason every week in the UK.

“Certainly second cot deaths can be true cot deaths, where all other causes have been excluded.”

And this is the rub - for “think dirty” evidence will bring together every other conceivable cause of death, and induce jurors (knowing nothing of the subject) to believe there must have been murder.

Epidemiologist Professor Jean Golding, a senior expert in patterns of disease and illness, told the Salisbury jury there could be inherited genetic flaw.

“I couldn’t see where they were coming from in thinking there was any pattern that would mean this was not a natural set of deaths.”

She had identified one potentially significant pattern in the family.

A distant cousin in Ireland had experienced a series of four cot deaths and near-death experiences.

“It is intriguing that they seem to show the same pattern” putting the family at greater risk.
“Genetics is in its infancy and there are new discoveries all the time. Things that we had no idea about are being revealed everyday, and I think the Cannings family is going to be a very intriguing one to look at further.”

She gave the opinion that paediatricians had become too ready to suspect foul play where more than one child had died in the same family.

Criticising Prof Meadow’s conclusion that the Cannings case was typical of smothering, Prof Golding described his collection of case notes on smothering as the equivalent of a “stamp collection” and of little relevance.

“There are none of the patterns one would usually see in the background of someone who was out to murder her children.”

Vivian Howard, a prominent toxico-pathologist, listed a number of ways in which the babies might accidentally have been exposed to potentially dangerous levels of organo-phosphates (OPs); originally developed as chemical weapons, at the time of the infant deaths they occurred in diluted form in insecticides, in agricultural use and within the home as fly-killers and flea powders for pets.

The Cannings’ home at Horse Barrow not only lay close to farmland and rail lines, both of which could have been sprayed with organophosphate preparations, but was also not even a hundred yards from the Porton Down Site.

She was in the habit of walking a dog and the babies around the village every day, allowing the dog to run in the fields.

OPs were semi-volatile; they could evaporate into the atmosphere and recondense elsewhere, particularly on absorbent surfaces such as bedding.

In recent years [particulary since the children’s deaths] they had become more sparingly used but some infants might be exceptionally vulnerable to toxins in the environment.

“They live rather closer to the edge than adults.”

Babies under six months old were particularly vulnerable to OPs because they had not yet developed the capacity to metabolise toxins.

After this evidence, unfortunately, the jury took an Easter break before returning to give their verdict [and to forget inconvenient facts].

On resumption, Paul Dunkels QC, prosecuting, asked the jury to ignore “the combination of medical reasons offered by the defence.” [Surely jurors should not ignore such evidence].

The common factor was that Jason and Matthew had the same mother and each baby was alone with her when he died. [Warning to women: never have more than one child; never be alone with it.]

“Jason’s scare on June 4, 1991, when he stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated, and his death nine days later both occurred after her husband had gone to work.”

[Husbands, don’t go to work, shops or pub, or there’s be murder.]

Organophosphates at Winterbourne Gunner could not have affected Matthew because the family lived in Salisbury during the baby’s lifetime. [But they could have collected in the mother’s body and been passed on in her milk.]

These are cockeyed arguments on which to base murder convictions, but with jurors who know nothing of cot death, they succeed.

Mike Mansfield QC, in his closing speech for the defence, said sudden infant death has its origins in the bible.

Because it remains a mystery does not mean there has to be a scapegoat.

There was no haemorrhaging of the eyes, no pressure marks, no bleeding from the nose and mouth [all regarded as indicators of smothering], no rib fractures, no old injuries.

“Matthew’s so-called life-threatening event was no such thing.

It was a vomit attack, misinterpreted by the mother as something threatening life.”

He was immune-deficient and becoming susceptible to various infections.
After the verdict, Angela has not been found guilty of murder; she’s guessed to be guilty.

Lawyers are preparing an appeal.

The entire legal system is heavily loaded against a defendant.

The suspect is escorted into the dock, having been held in jail perhaps for more than a year among inmates filled with hate for a monster who (the press informs them) is likely to have killed a baby, or two or three; in court, perhaps in handcuffs, with police or prison officers on each side, accused, allowed to speak only when voice is demanded, already identified to jurors over a period of many months in local and perhaps national or world media as an accused child-killer; and those jurors must be strangers to her and cannot know anything to her credit.

She stands on display in the dock, to be denounced and declared guilty by lawyers who paint in thick vivid daubs, producing images in stark black and white with huge crimson splashes of blood.

There is not the slightest doubt that you are evil, they declare.

The innocent victim was a helpless baby who must have been shaken for several minutes then dashed to the ground with force equivalent to a 15ft fall on to concrete, or cold-bloodedly suffocated.

All this is beyond question for there is no other way the killing could have taken place, declare the “think dirty” experts, while other equally qualified medical men attempt to suggest that possibly there may be doubt.

Is it in any way remarkable that mistakes are made, when the jurors called upon to decide have no knowledge of what the expert witnesses are arguing about, and they might as well be speaking in Mandarin Chinese, Farsi or Urdu?

There is little or no chance that jurors fully understanding vital evidence in these trials unless they themselves possess understanding of medicine; for accurate verdicts the defending counsel should have the right to demand that every juror is a General Practitioner or possess a doctorate in medicine.

Here is the far more civilised Florida solution for bringing people to trial: “Cutting edge - murder two,” on Channel 4, on November 3 and 4, 1998, gave a day-to-day picture of the murder trial in Florida of a Lancashire midwife who had made immediate admission to police of shooting her husband six times.

The defence secured her release on bail; she was given care of her baby to bring normality and calm to her life during the months of waiting; she received psychiatric counselling to prepare her for the ordeal of trial; a mock trial took place before students of law, to obtain opinion upon the best line of defence; there was a mock cross-examination, so that she could learn to appear calm, steadfast, confident, and aware of legal trickery which might infer that she had intended to kill; a group of perhaps twenty lawyers, psychologists and medical experts met for a round-table discussion on how best to outwit the prosecutor.

There was even an attempt to persuade a judge to declare her first hysterical confession to be inadmissible evidence.

All this on legal aid, with a highly experienced former chief prosecutor now turned defence counsel to lead the massive team.

It sounds ridiculous, yet does no more than put the defendant more nearly in equality with her accusers.

And the defence, unsurprisingly, was successful.

Compare this with trials elsewhere (and normal British procedure).

Every nuance that might conceivably hint at guilt is presented as hard evidence.

Louise Woodward had “dropped,” not “popped,” a child down; Tricia Muff had “whip-lashed” a baby’s head; Helen Stacey had used force “equivalent to an injury in a road traffic accident”; Manjit Basuta “banged a child’s head repeatedly on the floor” inflicting “very catastrophic injuries” (without leaving a bruise); Sally Clark was at fault in two directions - she had screamed hysterically in the ambulance, “diverting paramedics from their attempts to revive the child,” yet had “superficial” reaction according to a doctor who broke the news of the child’s death. [Advice for any mother accused of murdering a child: don’t show grief; don’t fail to show it.]

The accused parent or carer is left to choose a defence solicitor from her own small town, possibly while she is already held in custody.

She has no possible means to assess his skill.

It may be the first murder trial he has ever attended; almost certainly it will be his first child-murder case and he has no experience of refuting “dirty thinking” expert witnesses; he may be chosen during interrogation because this was the only lawyer on duty or whose name was known to the defendant (perhaps he once helped her buy a house).

There is no possibility to grieve and calm herself - unprepared for a situation in which the whole panoply of justice puts her in a bewildered starring role of “the prisoner at the bar,” she is unrehearsed, ashamed, frightened, under cross-examination, with a highly proficient Prosecutor doing his utmost to bring a pause, a hesitancy, a lack of verbal fluency, appearance of doubt, the slightest apparent contradiction.

She has had no mock-trial, no rehearsal of interrogation, no psychiatric counselling, and, in the appalling role of suspected child-killer, there is the knowledge that an adored baby (or several) died in a manner she cannot begin to understand, no doubt having feared for months that by some slight error or omission in mothercraft she had involuntarily caused the death(s).

The chance of acquittal in such a totally one-sided contest, experienced heavyweight against badly injured novice pigmy? It’s like an amateur lightweight in a 12-round encounter with Mike Tyson.

Furthermore, there is a huge flaw in the modus operandi of trial by jury: the requirement that they get together to agree their verdict.

There are many cases (such as Angela’s) in which no one other than God and the accused can know for certain whether there is culpability.

We are not allowed to know what goes on behind the doors of a jury room - but can we speculate?

Some jurors, given a dreadful and almost impossible task, might prefer a verdict of not-proven, but outside Scotland the law does not allow it.

The judge wants unison, for it’s so much more satisfactory, removing (or disguising) all appearance of doubt.

If there can’t be unison, he might agree to accept a 10-2 majority conviction (conveniently regarding this as “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” despite the 16.8% belief in innocence).

And if the jury is split 9-3 he might order a retrial to bring the illusion of certainty next time.

What are the thoughts of the jurors during protracted argument, knowing that until they agree, discussion may go on for days longer, growing more heated and more futile with every hour, for there is nothing new emerging?

One Alf Garnett among them - prejudiced, loud-mouthed, highly opinionated, incapable of seeing any other viewpoint - can gradually force the other eleven to forget their scruples and convict.

A passionate member of the hang ’em, flog ’em, lock ’em up for life brigade, he cannot be argued with; he knows wrong from right, and that’s that. The police have made an arrest, there’s been questioning and a charge was laid, so it’s obvious that they know more than they can say.

Other jurors, wishing to dissent, have the choice of fruitless squabbling for the next several hours or days, or giving way to duress and blackmail (denial of their wish to get it over and go home).

Is it inconceivable that eleven jurors, placid by nature, unused to pub brawls and arguments, could be forced to suppress their own doubts and convict under the inflexibility of one?

There may be just one or two jurors capable of real understanding when a complex medical issue is involved, but let’s suppose they are unaccustomed to heated bar-room disputation: it creates a situation in which, to quote an old saying, “The best lacking all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Faced with one or two others, more forceful and opinionated, brushing aside technicalities, which view is likely to predominate?

And is it necessarily the truth?

As one reform (writes Tom Watkins, of the Portia Campaign), jurors should be required to account for their views in writing, to show they had undertaken the task fairly.

It would force them to take a responsible attitude, and if it became apparent that there was prejudice or misunderstand, this would give grounds for appeal.

Because they would need to take notes, there would be less likelihood of minds wandering.

And if jurors were put into 12 separate rooms, out of contact with others while making their decisions and writing in explanation, those with dominant views (either way) could not influence the opinions of others.

This, however, would certainly not please Home Secretary David Blunkett who has already complained that there are too many acquittals.

The establishment, actually, doesn’t give a monkey’s cuss whether or not Angela is falsely convicted - either way she has served the purpose by deterring other parents and carers from killing babies.

It’s a logical, valid argument, of course, and applies to many other types of crime.

Except that, having the largest proportion of prisoners in Europe, you would logically expect a dramatic decline in crime.

We can speak only for cases involving child death.

There is no dramatic decline; this would come only if tragedies such as Angela’s were scientifically investigated, genetic defects and toxins detected, and treatment given.

Years ago a hard-working doctor showed that thalidomide had a less than desirable effect on new-born babies – they had defective arms or legs.

In less than two years he was struck off the medical register. A director of the company which supplied this drug got a knighthood.

I (John Fryer) know a thalidomide victim.

She was born with a defective hand. Her twin brother was a deformed thalidomide victim born dead.

There was just one problem – although my friend’s mother took thalidomide, she could not prove it.

So she is not recognised as a thalidomide case and does not show up on the government figures.

Neither does the twin brother; he was a bit of waste down the hospital sluice, just part of the after-birth.

We do have a peer-reviewed paper showing that an 80% death rate among children is possible in a small village next to a source of OP nerve toxins.

This is not Winterbourne Gunner, of course, but a small European village called Rinya, where the population availed themselves of some easy-to-catch fish.

They did not know that the fish had been made ill by an OP product, and a carnage of infants followed.

In fairness, when it was recognised that risk existed around Porton Down, men in space-suits cleared up a lot of mess.

They claimed that the 100 or so glass phials found were intact, complete with life-destroying nerve agents sealed in safely.

They were less forthcoming about 1,000 remnants of phials picked up at the same time. Angela had at least four exposures to nerve-destroying toxins:

1. The chemical establishment;
2. Dumped nerve agents;
3. She used OP flea spray on her dog – diazinon or chlorpyrifos, one since withdrawn and the other banned for use in the home - perhaps this was because of experiences like Angela’s although such a link has never been admitted;
4. In the mattress used by Matthew there was an OP flame retardant – probably TCP or tricresyl phosphate. In 1932 a few drops spilled on to a worker; he died, but production and sales went ahead.;

Fire risk has diminished with the open coal fire; children’s clothes do not spontaneously burst into flame when near a radiator.

Clearly OP’s are a risk and it seems that babies are more sensitive than adults.

Angela to this day may have OP’s still in her body, as a result of time spent at Winterbourne Gunner, bringing possibility of death to any child she suckled.

We have knowledge that phenothiazines lead to the symptoms and findings of Cot Death – we can therefore be sure that the completely unacceptable risk of what Angela used in her home, the unfortunate OP in the